Coorabell Hall Film Club
Wednesday 4 December
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

Food & drinks (Licensed) from 6.00PM
Movie starts at 7.30PM

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes 1953

Howard Hawks’ classic musical comedy offers post-war movie bombshells in the shape of Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell dressed as sequined Amazons. Blinding with brash Technicolor reds and lurid purples (“We purposely made it as loud and bright as we could, and completely vulgar,” Hawks said.)—and glittering with diamonds, a girl’s best friend -Gentlemen - is to some, “a landmark encounter in the battle of the sexes in which Hawks keeps topping perversity with perversity”. Lorelei Lee and Dorothy are the man-hungry gold diggers from Anita Loos’ bestselling 1925 novel; two showgirls from Little Rock en route to Paris on a luxury ocean liner. The film’s gleeful satire of it all exposes a world of caricatures. But Hawks is good-natured: he looks, but does not judge, and even admires, his two professional women, just as we cannot fail to admire Russell and Monroe, who excel at a smiling send-up of themselves. 

Hawks’s whiplash-wicked comic set pieces display his classic themes of gender swaps and repressed desires, and Monroe’s expert timing, inflections and expressions have a deliciously clever and sharply experienced irony. Jack Cole’s choreography offers some of the most incisively swinging musical numbers ever filmed, notably the now iconic, fabulously pink “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” which shot Marilyn into the stratosphere, and the strenuously camp-athletic “Ain’t There Anyone Here for Love?,” featuring Russell and an entire male Olympic swim team.

To quote Norman Mailer, "Never again in her career will Monroe look so sexually perfect, no never. Her physical coordination is never more vigorous and athletically quick; she dances with all the grace she is ever going to need, all the grace and all the pizzazz — she is a musical comedy star with panache.”